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Topic: Lenten Reading 2013 (Read 755 times)

Care to share your Lenten reading? In addition to Fr. Lawrence's Bible Commentaries, I'm thinking of The Path to Salvation by St. Theophan the Recluse or (maybe) The Ladder of Divine Ascent, but that one's always been difficult for me.

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"The Scots-Irish; Brewed in Scotland, bottled in Ireland, uncorked in America." ~Scots-Irish saying

It's rather quintessential, but The Ladder of Divine Ascent by St. John Klimakos.

I've been attending the Orthodox Church for nearly four years, and have been baptized for two, and I've never read it.

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"Hades is not a place, no, but a state of the soul. It begins here on earth. Just so, paradise begins in the soul of a man here in the earthly life. Here we already have contact with the divine..." -St. John, Wonderworker of Shanghai and San Francisco, Homily On the Sunday of Orthodoxy

Care to share your Lenten reading? In addition to Fr. Lawrence's Bible Commentaries, I'm thinking of The Path to Salvation by St. Theophan the Recluse or (maybe) The Ladder of Divine Ascent, but that one's always been difficult for me.

Haha. I was blessed to read The Arena by St. Ignaty Branchininov some time ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm told the work is a summation of St. John's Ladder.

I think we have to understand such works for what they are, literature written for a specific audience at a specific time, which means we aren't that audience anymore. There are great things about living spiritually in them, but we have to realize we aren't monastics, not even novices, and much less aged hermits! Not everything is going to apply to us in some direct, one-to-one style extrapolation.

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"Hades is not a place, no, but a state of the soul. It begins here on earth. Just so, paradise begins in the soul of a man here in the earthly life. Here we already have contact with the divine..." -St. John, Wonderworker of Shanghai and San Francisco, Homily On the Sunday of Orthodoxy

First Fruits of Prayer: A Forty-Day Journey Through the Canon of St. Andrew by Frederica Mathewes-Green. It devotes a section of the Canon to each day of Lent. The author explains the Scripture reference in each comparison in the Canon and comments on it.

On the somewhat secular side: The Brother Cadfael series by Ellis Peters. Cadfael is a Crusader turned monasatic. His worldy background and expertise as a herbalist equip him to be a medieval homicide detective.